Syllabus

English 1010: Writing Across Borders

The University of Connecticut’s First-Year Writing (FYW) seminars are characterized by collaborative, student-driven inquiry. As a general education course, FYW prepares students for future compositions both within and outside of the university by asking them to use writing to contribute to active conversations across various media. The FYW instructor and student work collaboratively to compose through engagement with a semester-long inquiry, developing and asking questions through a shared area of exploration. Through cycles of creation, feedback, and reflection, students work on projects in which they select and define places where they might advance the class conversation. Your work this semester will introduce you to the kinds of processes, choices, and moves you will make throughout your life as a writer and creator of content. The work of this class will include reading and responding to those texts in substantive, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and productive ways through multiple modes of communication and representation.

Inquiry

Writing is always an act of crossing. In this class, we’ll consider what it means to write across media, languages, and borders. We’ll do this by considering writing’s role in one of the most contentious crossing points in contemporary American discourse—the US-Mexico border. We’ll have the opportunity to practice writing for translation, and we’ll experiment with what happens to writing in digital spaces as it interacts with other media. We’ll analyze the rhetoric surrounding contemporary debates surrounding immigration, and we’ll enter our writing into the conversation. And we’ll have the chance to use writing-as-activism as we partner with a nonprofit dedicated to migrant rights.

In this class, we’ll write. And then we’ll think about what that writing does. And then we’ll write some more.

Program Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

Approach composition as a complex process
- Practice composing and writing as creative acts of inquiry and discovery through written, aural, visual, video, gestural, and spatial texts
- Consider projects and problems from multiple ways of knowing
- Develop new methods for all forms (including digital) of textual analysis, synthesis, and representation
- Formulate strategies for the conceptual, investigative, practical, and reflective work of writing
Identify yourself as a writer
- Contribute to others’ knowledge and understanding through your research and compositions
- Practice ethical scholarship and develop a strong identity as a responsible maker of meaning
Engage with a conversation
- Discover, analyze, and engage with others’ ideas in productive ways through complex texts
- Approach and use texts as ways to analyze, interpret, and reconsider ideas
- Extend your ideas to new ground in the context of others’ work
Critically examine different ways of knowing
- Identify and analyze conventions of disciplines
- Interrogate genre expectations, including how knowledge is created and how evidence is used to forward work in academic disciplines
- Evaluate the functional components of format, organization, document design, and citation
Use technology rhetorically
- Recognize that technologies are not neutral tools for making meaning
- Assess the context and mode of technology you are using to compose
- Respond to situations with productive choices to deliver meaningful texts
- Employ the principles of universal design to make your work accessible and legible to the widest possible audience

Course Components

Writing

As this is a writing class, you’ll be writing. A lot. Some of this writing will be formal, revised projects. Other writing will be brief, low-stakes assignments designed to help you think through the more formal pieces. We’ll also write during class time, so be prepared by bringing something to write with. In this class, we’ll use the word writing expansively. That is, writing will encompass not only typed, essayistic prose but also a wide range of genres and media—professional writing, social media posts, infographics, web content, and translations, to name a few.

Revision

Formal writing projects will go through a drafting and revision process. During drafting, you’ll shape your ideas and experiment with ways to best communicate this work. You should expect to put significant time and effort into the revision process and for projects to shift, change, and develop as you revise. You should also assume that you will be sharing your writing with others (your instructor and peers) as part of the revision process. Revision can mean a lot of things, but in this class, I assume that revision involves a true reimagining of the project. Revision is not simply polishing up a few stylistic errors at the end of the writing process.

Participation

This is a seminar rather than a lecture course. Thoughtful discourse is an essential part of this class, and you will frequently work in groups of various sizes, which means you will need to be considerate of and attentive to others. It is your responsibility to keep up with the reading, to contribute to class conversation in the form of analytical comments or questions, and to attend class regularly and on time. There will be many ways to participate if speaking in front of the whole class is not something you like to do often, but engagement in the course through active listening and contributing to activities is essential.

Active Learning

One key element of the First-Year Writing curriculum is the concept of active learning. Active learning means that you learn by doing rather than memorizing things that an expert tells you. Active learning can feel uncomfortable if you’re used to more traditional classes; it may feel like more work compared to listening to a lecture. But research shows that people learn more and are challenged more when engaging in active learning practices—even when those practices feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

Collaboration

Throughout this course, we will rely on each other during processes like peer review and class activities. In addition, the largest project of the semester, the Community Partner Project, will be a collaborative writing assignment. We will devote some time to developing collaborative writing strategies to prepare for this work.

Engaging with Texts

Although English 1010 is a writing course, the writing you do here has a very close relationship to reading texts. “Reading” and “texts” are conceived broadly here, however, and may include engaging with videos, podcasts, graphics, and other media. The process of writing often begins with careful reading of a situation, written text, or various media. You will be reading to find ways into the conversation in which an author or text is participating. In order to engage substantively with these texts, you will need to go over them more than once.

Information Literacy

English 1010 provides the first stage of the university’s Information Literacy competency. You should expect to use outside sources and scholarly research to inform your work throughout the semester. While all assignments will provide opportunities for developing Information Literacy skills, we will have at least one assignment that will be built with this specific purpose in mind.

Information Literacy

As part of the First-Year Writing program’s pilot curriculum, this course will include special attention to digital literacy—how to use digital tools for writing, research, and collaboration. In particular, the corequisite Studio attached to this course will help you develop familiarity with a variety of software and techniques for creating digital projects.

Reflection

Asynchronous

To Do: Read Giles, “Reflective Writing and the Revision Process”; Kennedy, “Textual Curation excerpt”

Participation: Annotate reading in Perusall

Participation: Respond to end-of-semester questionnaire

Synchronous

Final conference with instructor

Finals Week

Due: Portfolio